Parental Control
I have always harbored mixed feelings concerning parental control. For the longest time, my argument was that education, making sure the PC was in a public place in the house, and instilling good values in users was enough. Now I understand that there is always extenuating circumstances.
The problem with Internet filters and the like is that they can only be as good as the designer. I remember working on a pc that had an early version of a church sponsored Internet filter. The problem was, the little girl using the computer couldn’t get any site on bunnies to come up. You see, the filter had been programmed that bunnies (playboy bunnies) was inappropriate material. Myself, I used a pc with a filter disallowing weapons, so my eBay search for 12 gauge sheet steel for blacksmithing was disallowed (12 gauge shotgun).
Now to the tools.
The other major concern with parental control is to put enough in place to protect the user without either losing their trust, or making the PC so locked that it isn’t useful. I will address this a little as I introduce a few tools.
Microsoft introduced Parental controls built into the operating system in Vista. So if you have vista, all you need to do is turn them on. I can’t help you much with this tool as I haven’t ever used it. If you are like me and are still using Windows XP for whatever reason, there are a couple of tools that you can use.
Family Safety beta – A free tool offered though Microsoft’s Windows Live. The versatility of this program makes it a top pick (well that and the price tag of $0). If all you need is an activity report so you can make sure your users aren’t going places they shouldn’t, it has that. If you need content filtering, it has that. If you want to protect your younger kids against online predators, it has some capability to do that (at least with MSN messenger and Hotmail contacts). The other really nice part is the ability to make changes to the program from another PC. The Anywhere Access allows you to control all this from another computer!
Windows Steady State – This is a really intrusive tool that I have used to lock down PCs in a commercial shared computing environment. When your user has a tendency to mess with system settings and such even with a limited user account, this tool is for you. It is so inhibitive as to allow you to restrict a user account to only specific hand-selected websites. Not necessarily for your typical household, but I have seen it very useful in enforcing a grounding ;P
Now, as far as open source tools go, they are hard to come by and usually don’t have a lot of functionality (Dan’s Guardian for Ubuntu is awesome, especially as an internet proxy filtering content for your entire network, but this doesn’t help less tech savvy Windows users). As far as commercial product go, there are dozens. I personally like Cyber Patrol (about $40), but you can make your own choice with review sites like http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/.
Now, there are ways to protect your family without additional software.
In the control panel, open Internet options. Click on content and then enable the content advisor. This allows you to set the acceptable level of language, nudity, sex, and violence the users can see through Internet Explorer. This is based on RSACi codes that Internet site adopt. Unfortunately many sites don’t bother with them. Luckily most sites with pornography do as they would much rather be filtered than get hit with a lawsuit for delivering porn to adolescents. There is unfortunately no similar functionality in Firefox as Firefox was built to be light and fast.
Lastly, if you have a user that simply has a problem with a particular website you can add that website to your hosts file with an IP of localhost to effectively kill your computer’s ability to get to that page. For more details on this option, ask in comments.
Thanks Sandi for your comment; I hope this answers your question!
The problem with Internet filters and the like is that they can only be as good as the designer. I remember working on a pc that had an early version of a church sponsored Internet filter. The problem was, the little girl using the computer couldn’t get any site on bunnies to come up. You see, the filter had been programmed that bunnies (playboy bunnies) was inappropriate material. Myself, I used a pc with a filter disallowing weapons, so my eBay search for 12 gauge sheet steel for blacksmithing was disallowed (12 gauge shotgun).
Now to the tools.
The other major concern with parental control is to put enough in place to protect the user without either losing their trust, or making the PC so locked that it isn’t useful. I will address this a little as I introduce a few tools.
Microsoft introduced Parental controls built into the operating system in Vista. So if you have vista, all you need to do is turn them on. I can’t help you much with this tool as I haven’t ever used it. If you are like me and are still using Windows XP for whatever reason, there are a couple of tools that you can use.
Family Safety beta – A free tool offered though Microsoft’s Windows Live. The versatility of this program makes it a top pick (well that and the price tag of $0). If all you need is an activity report so you can make sure your users aren’t going places they shouldn’t, it has that. If you need content filtering, it has that. If you want to protect your younger kids against online predators, it has some capability to do that (at least with MSN messenger and Hotmail contacts). The other really nice part is the ability to make changes to the program from another PC. The Anywhere Access allows you to control all this from another computer!
Windows Steady State – This is a really intrusive tool that I have used to lock down PCs in a commercial shared computing environment. When your user has a tendency to mess with system settings and such even with a limited user account, this tool is for you. It is so inhibitive as to allow you to restrict a user account to only specific hand-selected websites. Not necessarily for your typical household, but I have seen it very useful in enforcing a grounding ;P
Now, as far as open source tools go, they are hard to come by and usually don’t have a lot of functionality (Dan’s Guardian for Ubuntu is awesome, especially as an internet proxy filtering content for your entire network, but this doesn’t help less tech savvy Windows users). As far as commercial product go, there are dozens. I personally like Cyber Patrol (about $40), but you can make your own choice with review sites like http://internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/.
Now, there are ways to protect your family without additional software.
In the control panel, open Internet options. Click on content and then enable the content advisor. This allows you to set the acceptable level of language, nudity, sex, and violence the users can see through Internet Explorer. This is based on RSACi codes that Internet site adopt. Unfortunately many sites don’t bother with them. Luckily most sites with pornography do as they would much rather be filtered than get hit with a lawsuit for delivering porn to adolescents. There is unfortunately no similar functionality in Firefox as Firefox was built to be light and fast.
Lastly, if you have a user that simply has a problem with a particular website you can add that website to your hosts file with an IP of localhost to effectively kill your computer’s ability to get to that page. For more details on this option, ask in comments.
Thanks Sandi for your comment; I hope this answers your question!
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